Today's reporting solutions need to meet more and more demanding requirements, but the attention isn't only paid to the number of functions they provide, what's important is ease of usage. And this is the category which only sparse other solutions can compete with SAS Web Report Studio in.

A need for reporting occurred long before the Business Intelligence solutions where simple enough to let non-technical professionals use them without problems. Then, for quite a lot of time all reporting tasks required the IT departments involvement. The specialists were needed for everything, for every little change in the reports, not even mentioning report preparation or report delivery. But the times changed and today's solutions let business people take care about reporting tasks, thus accelerate the time to value. Once there is no need to involve IT specialists, reports may be spread faster and - as a consequence - get analyzed soon enough to make an efficient decision, what wouldn't be possible otherwise. SAS specialists paid a lot of attention to this aspect so that their Web Report Studio became one of a few such "user independent" solutions in the market.

The idea of SAS Web Report Studio was to allow easy access to both, query and reporting capabilities through the Web. As a result, everyone in an organization may focus on what's most important - IT on strategic projects, and business on business decisions. Along with these changes significant reduction of operational costs and superfluous time wastes.

Basically, there are three areas where SAS Web Report Studio contributes to the business:

• self-service access to data and product capabilities
• IT and corporate data business value growth
• training and support needs reduction.

Report Wizard included in SAS Web Report Studio helps automate the report preparation process and when the reports are finished, it's reasonable to put them in an easy to share and reach place. The environment which Web Report Studio works within allows to create folders and subfolders. Thank to multiple security options, report designer can determine who to allow to access the report. Eventually, it's nothing unusual that these stored reports can be further edited, moved, renamed, and modified in any way.

Besides storing the reports on a hard disk, it's possible to print them or export, or distribute to as many receivers as needed. In case of printing, all required capabilities are provided, included pagination, paper size, margins, and other settings. Before/instead of printing, it's possible to save a report as PDF file.

SAS Web Report Studio features

The main features of SAS Web Report Studio include:

• a wide set of report management capabilities allowing to sort the reports in an organized way
• multiple report interaction options, including OLAP-specific capabilities like drill and pivot
• report authoring and distribution based on roles
• enhanced data access
• facilitated administration and manageability
• amazing internalization - the main interface of the solution may be displayed in twelve different languages, including Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish

SAS Web Report Studio resources:

http://www.sas.com/resources/asset/sas-web-report-studio-factsheet.pdf - the main source of knowledge about SAS Web Report Studio solution. Called a fact sheet, it's a brochure which contains quite a lot of information about the product. There is a short introduction provided with symbolic descriptions of each product's functionality and a comprehensive list of SAS Web Report Studio features and the technical requirements information at the very beginning.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/wrs/index.html - a part of the support section of the SAS official website and the whole product documentation for SAS Web Report Studio. As a result, what one can find there are all the related documents, including the novelties introduced in the newest release of the software, administration guides, diverse manuals, and a few other - also worth reading - brochures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc5FYAOsowk - neither books nor brochures could be as easy to understand as videos are. The one behind the link is the first part of SAS video introduction to Web Report Studio. Because it's addressed to the very beginners, only the fundamentals are included and explained in a very transparent way. Nonetheless, as for the beginners there is no better source of knowledge.